Catfish

I know the hunger.

That it chews you,

and not your chains.

A rowboat, an oarless boy.

Who am I to starve a man?

To evade the net cast out to

loop around my

heart and put it in your ice chest.

To swim against your ankles

with speed

and no penance.

To take no bait

from the fragile hook that feeds me.

To be your nourishment,

also, then, your murderer.

Clean & slim

The ticking in my left cornea
8 months
 12 before that
His hand articulating my spine
A phantom heart
An Indian giver

Strabismus

Your umpteenth^th birthday. Pleading to candle

flames to take you along (put you out) when they

water down, and

chair legs always leaning

to tip

tumble, leave tattered little boy on his knees

(already scraped) and crawling toward

the kitchen (not his kitchen) looking for cookies,

and light,

and women,

women’s cookies.

You chew with the crumbs coating your lips.

Spewing across the slick tile,

“could you button up my shirt sleeves,”

could you,

could you?

Could I think of a reason not to (selfishness? self fulfilled prophecy?)

that would justify an abandoned infant

around sharp objects. There is no way to say.

There is no one left to say who will emerge as his savior, no one volunteers

as such, the medicine won’t pick up the telephone, and

even on the day of

the umpteenth birthday, the silence

surrounds. It only breaks itself,

whispering “we can’t fix a brain.

We can’t fix a brain because things don’t fix themselves”,

My own thinks this to be true too.

Eskimo kisses

believe me
believe me when I tell you
the world isn't as round and slippery as it was in the winter
when it was all covered with a sheet of ice
we could skate across an ocean
take time on opposite sides and still meet back home for supper
now there's only a one way ticket
i love you for keeping it cold
putting my boiling mind in an ice tray
piecing my mangled heart like an igloo
we don't have to worry about our histories with lost love repeating
i know this
because it's fucking hot now and it's still beating
you'll keep beating
you'll keep winning
i'll watch you proudly from the other side of a melted world
i promise

Simple math

A relative extrema exists at me because f ' (x)  is equivalent to my resolve (all other conditions met)
∴  my opinion is disabling

Coffeehouse-March 2014

At 11:28 pm they got into the car.

Turned on the heat turned on a dime turned out okay, maybe, turned their skin inside out looking for answers. They could have been on the windshield but there was too much steam, there. The world is such a harsh place, but not in here. 

They hadn't felt comfortable in it anywhere else for the past twelve years, let backs bend with breezes instead of prickling goose bumps, throw expectation to the pavement and, well, pound it, play house without mortgages or septic systems, they would play it here, they would play it tonight,
I've never wanted to keep someone so safe in my life.

Never wanted to trace scars so much in my life, so fast, something so infantile, see, we have the same ones. The moonlight hitting the dash is making them glow more than usual, they're so god damn beautiful, you make me feel not like a robot.

I hate feeling like a robot so thanks for that, thanks for this drizzle of rain rolling down the window and pyx 106 and tracy chapman, thanks for taking a chance on me and thanks for thinking manic fits are endearing, I'm through with the fearing, of tomorrow or the dwelling in the past I'm here I'm really here in the car.

The snow around the tires is puddling because it's so warm we're changing February we're altering the climate this is coming from a skeptic but I swear it's happening,
I think this car might be Noah's ark. 
Because we have to be preserving some degree of humanity here, somehow I've found my sanity here, do you hear the way that swing set is swaying for us? 
The monkey bars are creaking for us? 
I used to sit on them as a child I'm not a child but I feel childlike, renewed, free, turning to a blank page here's a pen, start writing. 

At 1:07 am they got out of the car. It was a new day, a new February, both knowing that spring would come much, much earlier this year.

Coffeehouse-October 2013

She was sitting in the basement, thinking about stealing one of her mom’s cigarettes for kicks but decided against it, she had never been too good with lighters. She laughed in the dark partly because she knew herself too well, and mostly because she could again.

You see the past year had been spent thinking about writing a self help book titled “Dear Everyone: The World is Indeed Not Your Oyster". It all started when the was winter a little colder than usual, took too long to shake off the goose bumps, she was still shivering at the beginning of the summer. Wishing for a straw to lodge into a lung for air because as far as she could tell she found the oyster, but the pearl was just so easy to choke on.

Those pearls. She was wearing the same ones when it all fell apart and of course when it all fell together again, she was a creature of continuity. Doodling full circles on her arms and tattooing them to her memories but not infinity symbols, never infinity symbols because they were too human. Human. The word reserved for all the others, the ones who chewed with their mouths open, only saw as far as their vision would allow them, knew nothing but the instincts their bodies told them. But those people never needed to breathe through a straw, didn’t have to sleep with a snake in the next bed over and those people never looked at an ocean and wished they were on the bottom of it. So she thought about those people, and the past year, her vision that would never fail her, and the hole from the straw, and so she knew. It was time for a change. Time to take the humanity off the shelf, look at it everyday, keep it in her pocket and touch it when she needed a reminder that she was small. Not small in the bad way, but small enough to know that the hands on her windpipe could never have been as big as they once seemed, that she could fit between the couch cushions, slip through a crack if she needed an escape, could be the missing corner piece of the puzzle, maybe even someone else’s puzzle, could stand next to anyone and whisper “you’re small too, isn’t it beautiful?”

I was sitting in the basement, thinking about stealing one of my mother’s cigarettes, watching the credits roll over all the concrete surfaces laughing with myself about nothing, finally feeling like something, a little small, a little human, but not so bad in the end.